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The Re-education of Anchee Min

At 6 o'clock on a Sunday morning, the San Bernadino Freeway heading east from Los Angeles toward the San Gabriel Mountains is deserted, and the strip malls and subdivisions that sprawl along the hillsides are still blanketed in the gray sleepiness of night. But I am very much awake, thanks to jet lag and my anxious anticipation of the six-mile pre-breakfast hike to which the writer Anchee Min has summoned me.

Anchee's first book, the best-selling memoir ''Red Azalea,'' published in 1994, chronicles Anchee's adolescence, during China's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. She grew up in a world turned upside down by ideological enthusiasm, a carnival of terror presided over by Mao Zedong and his wife, Jiang Qing. (The book may soon be made into a movie by Whit Stillman, the most proudly bourgeois filmmaker alive.) It ends, rather abruptly, with her departure, in September 1984, for the United States. In her mind, America might as well have been the moon, ''icy, airless and soundless.''

Even this peaceful, anodyne corner of blossoming Southern California suburbia seems a most unlikely place for Anchee Min to make her home. As the driver negotiates the curving streets of Hacienda Heights, I study the mock-Spanish house fronts and the succulent hedges for clues to the presence within of a former Red Guard and would-be revolutionary movie star who has become a wild, passionate and fearless American writer.

Instead, the cab stops in front of a generic ranch house with two cars, a tidy lawn and an ''armed response'' security sign. Anchee, a small, wiry woman in faded black sweat pants and a loose gray shirt, greets me and shows me into the sparsely furnished living room, where she introduces me to Lauryann, her 8-year-old daughter from a previous marriage, and Lloyd, the tall, soft-spoken high school English teacher she married last year. ''We're not quite ready to go yet,'' she says. ''Lauryann and I are still doing our warm-up.''

Anchee presses the play button on a portable tape player, and she and Lauryann scramble to take up positions facing the long, mirrored wall. The room is soon filled with the sound of swooping strings and Chinese lyrics delivered in a keening, nasal soprano. Anchee, her mouth fixed in a wide stage smile and her back as straight as the barrel of a rifle, leaps and twirls across the room, whispering encouragement -- keep your head up, hold your arms straighter, keep smiling'' -- to Lauryann, who is wobbly but determined. When the number is over, not sure how else to respond, I offer polite applause, which Lloyd joins. ''That's from 'The White-Haired Girl,' ''Anchee says. ''One of Madame Mao's most famous operas.''

Madame Mao -- Jiang Qing, the former Shanghai actress who seduced Mao Zedong in the caves of Yanan and later became the ideological architect of the Cultural Revolution -- is the subject of Anchee Min's new novel, ''Becoming Madame Mao,'' published this month by Houghton Mifflin. Arrested after Mao's death in 1976, she was placed under a death sentence that was later commuted. In 1991, she committed suicide. In the years since her downfall, Jiang has served as an image of political monstrosity in the West and in China (where she was denounced as a ''white-boned demon''), a case study in revolutionary fanaticism and ruthless cunning. ''She's the concubine who gets too much power and destroys the dynasty,'' Anchee explains. ''It's a very old story in China.'' And one that resonates deeply with Anchee, who will also publish a novel about China's last empress dowager. ''That one's going to be 800 pages long,'' says Lloyd with a laugh.

''Becoming Madame Mao'' is a compact, dramatic historical saga -- and, Anchee insists, ''completely accurate. You can check it all out.'' The story begins with a young peasant girl named Yunhe tearing the bindings from her feet and follows her as she develops into a provincial Eve Harrington in the Shanghai theatrical world of the early 30's. She reinvents herself again, first as Lan Ping, an aspiring Communist intellectual, and then, after she marries Mao, as Jiang Qing, helpmate of a rising emperor. In all her later incarnations, she is a figure of indomitable will and quicksilver passion -- a kind of Marxist-Leninist Eva Peron. She visits chaos, misery and wanton slaughter on millions, but is at the same time a victim of deeply rooted misogyny; overcoming it, she emerges as a feminist heroine despite herself.

Culture was Jiang Qing's main base of operations. The Cultural Revolution began in 1966, following the denunciation of the popular play ''The Dismissal of Hai Rui From Office.'' At the revolution's height, Madame Mao and her coterie of artists and intellectuals controlled everything that the film studios, operas, theatrical companies and radio stations produced. And so Anchee, who was born into a more or less middle-class Shanghai family in 1957, grew up listening almost exclusively to loud, long and bombastic celebrations of China's triumphant revolutionary proletariat, four-hour extravaganzas in which, typically, a lone heroine challenged the cruelty of feudal landlords, Japanese invaders or Kuomintang soldiers and embodied the chaste, radiant virtue of the People's Republic.

Despite the 30 intervening years, the waning of Maoist fervor and her own transplantation to the land of Britney Spears, these operas still loom large in Anchee's daily life. A sheaf of mint-condition opera postcards -- depicting scenes that look like military campaigns adapted by Rodgers and Hammerstein -- remains one of her greatest treasures, along with an impressive collection of vintage red Mao buttons, some of which are featured on the cover of ''Becoming Madame Mao.'' And as we trundle along the wildflower-dappled trails, Lauryann and her mother trade revolutionary arias, as well as Chinese folk songs celebrating the beauty of nature.

Later, as we ride along the freeway in Lloyd's red Volvo, Anchee cranks up a recording of operas composed under Madame Mao's stern patronage. The performance of these operas has been banned in China since the late 1970's, but in their heyday they were a lifeblood of revolutionary youth culture. When this collection came out on compact disc a few years ago, Anchee says, ''it sold millions of copies, especially among people around my age.'' Even as they recall nightmare years of repression and deprivation, the operas of the Cultural Revolution are, for Anchee's generation, something equivalent to what Motown or the Beatles are for American baby boomers -- the soundtrack, at once personal and collective, of youth. ''This was all we had, the only popular culture there was. We listened to it over and over, we knew all the words. This was what we had to express ourselves,'' she explains. And even as she grimaces at the blatantly propagandistic intentions of the music, she also calls to my attention ''the human element.'' She defends not only the operas' musical quality -- which she attributes to the composer (and revolutionary minister of culture) Yung Hui-yung, portrayed in ''Becoming Madame Mao'' as an eccentric, self-destructive genius -- but also, to a certain degree, their political value. ''All the traditional opera and theater is about men,'' she said. ''Madame Mao wanted to show women in a heroic role.''

In ''Becoming Madame Mao,'' Jiang Qing is the heroine of her own opera -- lustful, vulnerable, imperious and ultimately tragic. Anchee's sense of her own life, as recalled in her memoir and in conversation, sometimes takes on operatic qualities as well. While she deprecates her skills as an actress -- I could never get that kind of feeling you need, the really strong emotion'' -- she comes across, on the page and in person, as someone with a fine sense of drama. Her narration of her own life in ''Red Azalea,'' like the passages in her new book rendered in Madame Mao's own voice, is marked by an emotional nakedness and a sexual intensity that overwhelm history, narrative and even sometimes the English language.

Anchee's traumatic encounter with Mao's misrule begins with her family's eviction from their Shanghai apartment and their relocation to a squalid communal house, where food was scarce. But the degradation and economic hardship the family endures is incidental to ''Red Azalea,'' which is centrally concerned with the moral corruptions of a system organized around rituals of private treachery and public shame. Her father, whose great passion was astronomy, was dismissed from a coveted job for discussing sunspots. ''They told him the sun represents Chairman Mao,'' Anchee tells me, ''and that talking about sunspots is criticizing the chairman.'' The climax of the book's first section comes when Anchee is coerced into denouncing her favorite teacher, who had introduced her to the ideologically tainted works of Hans Christian Andersen, as an American spy.

At 17, Anchee is sent to the Red Fire Farm, a labor camp in which people appear to speak entirely in proverbs from the Mao's ''Little Red Book'' and where every word, thought and action is subjected to rigorous scrutiny. The policing of sexuality is especially intense: when one of Anchee's co-workers, a young woman named Little Green, is caught in a sexual relationship with a man, her lover is sentenced to death for rape. Little Green suffers a complete mental collapse and eventually drowns herself in a river.

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But amid this repression, ''Red Azalea'' is an improbable and vivid love story. Anchee develops a crush on a work-team leader, a woman named Yan. A paragon of Maoist discipline and rectitude, Yan is locked in a bitter power struggle with the dogmatic and hypocritical Lu. Female rivalry is one of Anchee Min's great themes, and this escalating cat fight between Lu and Yan foreshadows Jiang Qing's battles with other actresses and political wives. But the lyrical simplicity of Anchee's prose also renders Yan and Lu as allegorical figures, embodiments of the two sides of the Communist personality, or of her own profound ambivalence about the culture of Maoism. Yan is selfless, hard-working and radiantly sacrificial, while Lu is manipulative, cruel and demanding.

''Nobody ever talks about it, but I think it must have been very common,'' Anchee Min says when I ask her about her relationship with Yan, the physical dimensions of which are related in passages at once steamy and curiously metaphorical:

''The moment I touched her breasts, I felt a sweet shock. My heart beat disorderly. A wild horse broke off its reins. She whispered something I could not hear. She was melting snow. I did not know what role I was playing anymore: her imagined man or myself. I was drawn to her. The horse kept running wild. I went where the sun rose. Her lips were the color of a tomato. There was a gale mixed with thunder inside of me. I was spellbound by desire.''

''You know, it was much tamer than you probably imagined when you read it,'' she says. ''We couldn't have boyfriends, and each of us was being like a boyfriend to the other.'' Maybe so, but the story ends with Anchee's heartbreak when she lets Yan use her bedroom for a tryst with an actual boyfriend. When I ask if she knows what became of Yan, Anchee looks wistful. ''I did find out about her,'' she says. ''She sent a message through a friend that said hello, she wished me well, but she didn't want to see me. It's very painful for a lot of people to remember that time.''

One day as Anchee was working in the cotton field, a team of talent scouts from the Shanghai film studio noticed her proletarian good looks and whisked her away for acting lessons. ''Madame Mao said I had the perfect peasant-type face,'' Anchee says, lifting her chin and squeezing her cheekbones to prove the point. After intense competition, Anchee won the lead role in a propaganda film inspired by Madame Mao herself. The role promised to make her famous, since ''people all over China had to see the films or be labeled reactionaries.''

But the film was never completed. When Jiang Qing fell, after Mao's death, Anchee, now classified as Madame Mao's ''political debris,'' became the pariah of the film studio. Treated as a nonperson and forced to perform endless menial tasks, Anchee slipped into despair. ''I was ready to kill myself,'' she says, recounting a long night she spent staring at the gas jets in the bathroom of the communal house she was living in. The years of her disgrace are tersely dealt with in the final paragraphs of ''Red Azalea,'' which ends with her arrival in America, thanks to the intervention of ''a young friend whom I used to know in film school.''

The friend was Joan Chen, who has herself recently explored the repressed memories of the Cultural Revolution in her film ''Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl.'' With Chen's help and sponsorship from an aunt in Singapore, Anchee Min obtained a passport and submitted an application to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the only American college she could find that didn't require proof of her proficiency in English. So Anchee, who didn't know a word of the language, had a friend fill out the forms for her. ''She checked the box that said 'English: excellent,' ''Anchee says. Her application was accepted.

She arrived in Chicago, wordless and friendless, and was promptly dismissed from the college, with six months to gain proficiency in English or face deportation. ''I watched 'Sesame Street,' 'The Electric Company' and Oprah Winfrey every day,'' she says, noting with a wry smile that it was Winfrey who later optioned her second book, ''Katherine,'' for a movie. In Chicago, she met her first husband, a fellow Chinese emigre. (They were divorced in 1995.) While supporting herself waiting on tables, painting floral designs on women's underwear and doing anything else she could find, she began to write her memoir. ''It was because of Little Green,'' she says. ''I had so much guilt about what happened to her. I wasn't thinking of getting published or being a writer, but I felt like I had to pay this debt to her.''

She chose English because Chinese was too freighted with Maoist cant, and emptied of expressive possibility. ''We didn't have any words for what happened to us,'' she says of her generation. ''There was no way for me to describe those experiences or talk about those feelings in Chinese. The Chinese language for me was taken over by Mao and Jiang Qing.'' Her prose, crude and powerful, with some of the sharp lyric compression of an Emily Dickinson poem, is full of raw, unassuaged anguish, and also surprising humor. She vividly registers both the horror and the ridiculousness of daily life under totalitarianism.

''At the film studio, they told Joan Chen to stay away from me, because I was a bourgeois individualist, and politically complicated,'' she says, savoring the old catch phrases. ''I think they were right.'' Perhaps they were. She lives now, with her child, her new husband and her newly planted geraniums, in a place that has raised bourgeois individualism to a universal principle, a utopian ideal more powerful than Communism ever was. But her political complexity hasn't gone away. Her husband, Lloyd, served as a marine in Vietnam, not far from where his future wife was learning anti-imperialist catechism as a Red Guard. ''I say to him, 'If we met each other 30 years ago we would have killed each other,' ''Anchee says as we stroll along a quiet side street. ''When I was in school they showed us a movie about a Vietnamese girl who was captured by the Americans, and it showed them gouging out her eyes with spoons. I would have strapped a bomb on myself and blown him up, and myself too.'' But she also says, with sincere admiration, that Lloyd would have made a good Communist because of his dedication to his students. ''He's up every morning at 4 o'clock, and he's not done until 6 or 7 at night. He works so hard on their papers, and he's very tough with them.''

Though Anchee Min travels freely between California and Shanghai, and is occasionally featured in newspaper articles in her homeland (which her father collects for her), none of her books have been published there. ''That could never happen as long as they think Mao is George Washington,'' she says with resignation. But though Mao appears, in the pages of her book, as a rapacious, narcissistic bully, Anchee doesn't regard him entirely as a monster. ''I wouldn't say that I worship Mao,'' she says judiciously, ''but I do admire some things about him. He was a great poet, you know. The two of them, Mao and Jiang Qing, it's important to remember that they were artists.'' Mao's earthy, witty verses show up in the book, and Anchee endows their author with an undeniably seductive vitality. Indeed, the account of his affair with Jiang Qing read like a classic bodice-ripper, overheated and faintly absurd: '' 'Everyone expects me to be a stone Buddha without desire or feelings,' he gasps on top of her. 'My comrades would like me better if I were a eunuch. But I am a tiger who can't be a vegetarian!' ''

The human Mao, like the human Jiang Qing, has been lost to history, a development Anchee regards with both relief and a touch of regret. Nowadays, she says a bit wistfully, nobody wants to read his poems. And the ''Little Red Book'' that was the literary cosmos of her youth has become something of a joke to the young generation in China. ''They just want to tear everything down. They just care about making money, buying as many things as they can,'' she says, with a curiously familiar baby boomer ring.

One of Mao's great essays was called ''On Contradiction,'' and Anchee, a child of Maoism in spite of it all, seems to live and write according to its logic. On a hot afternoon in the quiet town of Temple City, near Pasadena, Anchee, Lloyd and I stand around the back room of a storefront Chinese ballet school, waiting for Lauryann's class to begin. A group of girls is being drilled by a woman in her 60's with imposing posture and a stern demeanor. ''Look at her.'' Anchee says. ''She reminds me of Madame Mao.'' Surprised to hear a dance teacher compared with a genocidal dictator, I mutter something about how severe she seems. ''No.'' Anchee says quietly. ''Her face, that pale skin. So beautiful, don't you think?''